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Mike Senior's Expert Tracking & Mixing Tips
Mike Senior explores the subject of Haas delays at mixdown, explaining how they work, how to get the best out of them, and how to avoid the most common traps associated with them.
Chapters
00:00 - Introduction
Mike Senior explores the subject of Haas delays at mixdown, explaining how they work, how to get the best out of them, and how to avoid the most common traps associated with them.
Chapters
00:00 - Introduction
00:41 - Perception of short delays
02:46 - From fused delay to Haas delay
04:19 - Haas delays for stereo width
05:25 - Haas delays for blend and distance
09:26 - Haas delays for connecting panned doubletracks
10:56 - Pitfalls with Haas delays
14:50 - Summary
Credits
This month's episode features recordings from Johnny Lokke's 'Promises & Lies', Tom McKenzie's 'Directions', and Trafficker's 'My Father Never Loved Me'. If you'd like to try mixing these projects for yourself, you can download the full raw multitracks for them here:
These projects were also featured in Sound On Sound's 'Mix Rescue' column, in the January 2011, April 2013, and July 2018 issues respectively, which can be found in the magazine's article archives here:
Mike Senior Biog
Mike Senior is a professional audio engineer, regular SOS contributor, and author of the best-selling books Mixing Secrets For The Small Studio & Recording Secrets For The Small Studio. He runs the Cambridge-MT educational resources site (including the web's largest free multitrack download library) and hosts two monthly independent podcasts, Project Studio Tea Break and the Cambridge-MT Patrons Podcast.
Catch more shows on our other podcast channels: https://www.soundonsound.com/sos-podcasts
Catch more shows on our other podcast channels: https://www.soundonsound.com/sos-podcasts
Creators and Guests
Host
Mike Senior
Mike Senior is a professional audio engineer, regular SOS contributor, and author of the best-selling books Mixing Secrets For The Small Studio & Recording Secrets For The Small Studio. He runs the Cambridge-MT educational resources site (including the web's largest free multitrack download library) and hosts two monthly independent podcasts, Project Studio Tea Break and the Cambridge-MT Patrons Podcast.
What is Recording & Mixing?
Welcome to the Sound On Sound Recording and Mixing podcast channel where you’ll find shows packed with Hints & Tips about getting the most out of the recording, mixing and mastering process.
More information and content can be found at www.soundonsound.com/podcasts | Facebook, Twitter and Instagram - @soundonsoundmag | YouTube - https://www.youtube.com/user/soundonsoundvideo
Mike Senior
Welcome to the Sound On Sound recording and mixing podcast channel.
I'm Mike Senior. When most people think about delay effects, they imagine a trail of clearly defined echoes adding sustain, stereo interest, rhythmic complexity, or just ear catching wackiness to the mix. In this episode, though, I'd like to talk about Haas Delay effects, which are specialized, single tap echo patches that don't really create any effect tail as such, but can instead be used for widening, thickening, and blending purposes at mixdown.
Now, if you're going to understand how Haas Delays operate, you need to realize something important about the way we humans perceive short delays. For the sake of demonstration, I'm going to use this snippet of a simple electric guitar part, without any effect on it at all.
And here it is again with a simple 100 millisecond delay patch added to
it. Now you can clearly hear that kind of slap back delay effect in its own right there, as something distinct from the dry sound it's being applied to. But now let's reduce the delay time down to about 40 milliseconds.
What's happening now is that the delay is starting to fuse with the dry sound, such that it's quite difficult to pick out any distinct echo anymore. Now the exact delay time below which this kind of perceptual fusion occurs actually varies according to the nature of the sound that the delay is being applied to.
For example, here's a choppier rhythm guitar part. And
now here's the same 40 millisecond delay applied to that.
Because of all the spiky transients in that guitar part, it's much easier for our ears to pick out the discrete echoes, so they don't fuse with the dry sound in the same way. In this specific case, I found I had to turn the delay time down to about 15 milliseconds to get a really strong sense that the delay and the dry sound were merging together.
Like this.
Once you have a delay effect that has fused with the dry sound in this way, you can then pan the dry sound and the effect sound to different positions in the stereo picture and it creates a characteristic stereo widening effect. So in this next example, what I'll do is I'll start with the dry sound and the effect return panned centrally.
And then over the course of the example, I'll slowly pan them to opposite sides of the stereo picture, increasing the instrument's perceived width.
Now in that case, I'd panned the dry signal progressively to the left hand side. And even though the dry signal and the delay are actually at the same level, you still tend to hear the instrument as if it's coming from the left hand side. In other words, from the side of the dry signal. For the sake of comparison, let me do that same example, but I'll pan the dry signal to the right hand side instead.
It was these kinds of psycho acoustic stereo effects that the acoustician Helmut Haas was studying back in the early 50s, hence why these kinds of mixdown delay effects are often called Haas delays. That's enough of the theory though, what are the practical applications? Well so far the effects you've heard have been pretty extreme, because I've been keeping the delay at the same level as the dry signal.
Whereas in most mixdown situations, it's much more useful if you have the delay at a lower level. Let me play you a bit of that dry guitar again, panned slightly to the left. And then I'll repeat that snippet, but with a more subtle harsh delay, panned to the opposite side of the stereo picture. So first dry, and then with the harsh delay.
Now this is a much more tasteful setting of this effect, and fundamentally it serves two functions. The first is the one we've already discussed. It turns this single point image of the guitar into something that has a little bit more stereo width, so that it just takes up a little bit more space in the mix.
But the second thing that this effect does is that it slightly distances the instrument from the listener. In a sense, you could look at the short delay as being just a single reverb early reflection. Kind of like the simplest reverb patch you could possibly make. These effects are pretty subtle, so let's have another listen.
Again, I'll play it dry first, and then with the harsh delay. This is a video that I made on the channel called, The Ultimate Guitar Lesson. I'm going to show you how to play the guitar and how to play the guitar. I hope you enjoy this video. I'll see you in the next video. Bye. These characteristics make harsh delays very effective in situations where you have quite a sparse mix with lots of space to fill.
And you want to give a sense of depth and width but without any obvious reverb tail and without making it sound like you're artificially adding effect. So take this simple mix texture for example. Which is made up of just three, mono, dry overdubs. We should be connected. We should be brand new. We should have the courage to say that I want you.
We shouldn't be lonely. We shouldn't have doubt. We shouldn't be the ones to say that I want out, oh no. Now currently, each sound occupies its own distinct space in the stereo picture. And because all the parts were recorded separately, there's no spill or acoustic connection between the parts at all. As such, there's not a huge amount of depth perspective to the mix, because everything's pretty much as upfront as everything else.
And because each sound is in its own little box, you don't really get the sense that the instruments are cohering in the way you would expect them to in an organic natural ensemble recording. But that doesn't mean you have to suddenly slap a room reverb on it to try and get them all to glue together.
Because if you put harsh delays on the guitar and on the shaker, with their delay returns on the opposite side of the stereo picture, That'll effectively interleave the stereo images of the guitar and the shaker with each other, giving a sense of cohesion, and it'll also subtly distance them a little behind the lead vocal, but without undermining the nice intimacy of the performance and the arrangement as it stands.
Let me demonstrate what I mean. First I'll play that completely dry mix, and then I'll play it again with those harsh delays on the shaker and the guitar. We should be connected. We should be brand new. We should have the courage to say that I want you. We shouldn't be lonely. We shouldn't have doubt. We shouldn't be the ones to say that I want out, oh no.
We should be connected. We should be brand new. We should have the courage to say that I want you. We shouldn't be lonely. We shouldn't have doubt. We shouldn't be the ones to say that I want out, oh no. Now again, by design, this is meant to be quite a subtle and transparent sounding effect. So let me play that mix again to try and highlight the differences more clearly.
And what I'll do this time is that I'll only switch on the effects every other bar. We should be connected. We should be brand new. We should have the courage to say that I want you. We shouldn't be lonely. We shouldn't have doubt. We shouldn't be the ones to say that I want out, oh no. As you can hear, the Haas delays are increasing the perceived depth in the mix, making the instruments blend together better, and also enhancing the stereo width, which is no bad thing in a mix where the instruments are actually panned quite conservatively.
Another thing I commonly use Haas delays for is for bridging the gap in the stereo image between hard panned double tracks that can sometimes seem to me a little bit stranded on the edges of the stereo picture and almost dislocated from the mix texture as a whole. Take this little basic dry mix for example, which has those clean double tracked electric guitars in it, hard panned left and right.
Now if I give each one of those electric guitar parts its own harsh delay on the opposite side of the stereo spectrum, it creates a certain sonic connection between them, but without having to narrow the subjective stereo spread to do so. Let's have a listen. First I'll play the version without the harsh delays, and then a version with the harsh delay effects added.
The guitars just seem to sit more easily in the mix with those harsh delays, active and blend better with the other instruments. Okay, so we've looked at some of the potential advantages of using harsh delays. But there are also some potential downsides of using them. The first thing to say is that the things that I've been labelling as advantages so far can sometimes work against you.
So if all you want is stereo width and not any of the extra blend and distancing, then you'd probably better go for some other kind of stereo widening technique. Because harsh delays will always carry with them that slight whiff of acoustic early reflections. Probably the biggest pitfall people encounter though is mono compatibility.
In other words, the sound or the balance of the mix changing depending on whether you're listening to it in stereo or in mono, as you will on a lot of small mobile devices, for example. The root of the problem is that if you add your dry signal to a delayed signal with only a very short delay time, in order to get the delay to perceptually fuse with the dry signal, You're also creating a situation where you can get this destructive frequency cancellation effect called Cone Filtering.
So let's say I take this dry guitar signal.
And then I add an 18 millisecond delay to that, so that the delay merges perceptually with the dry signal.
Now, the tonal change that you're hearing there is on account of the comb filtering between the dry and delay signals. But if I now pan those two elements of the sound to opposite sides of the stereo image, As you tend to when you're creating harsh delay effects, it means that the dry and echo signals come out of different loudspeakers, or out of different sides of your headphones, and so they never actually mix together when you're listening in stereo, and therefore you don't hear the comb filtering side effects.
In other words, it sounds like this.
Now of course, if that stereo mix is at any point summed to mono, you know when it's broadcast over the shopping centre tannoy for example, that means that the left and right channel signals of your mix are combined and you get the comb filtering back again. And therein lies the mono compatibility problem.
For example, let me play back that stereo guitar sound from a moment ago, and I'll just toggle the mono button while it's playing. So you can appreciate the kind of differences I'm talking about.
Now there's a simple way to mitigate this kind of problem. Just use the delay at a lower level. You won't get a stronger Haas delay widening effect, but you'll get a lot less comb filtering between a lower level delay signal and the dry signal. The very worst mono compatibility problems that people tend to encounter are usually when they're trying to use Haas delays as a substitute for double tracking.
You know, they only have one guitar part, and so they use a Haas delay to try and make it sound like they have two. And of course, to balance out the stereo image under those kinds of circumstances, you'd want the dry and the wet signals to be the same level. Which is the worst news you can have as far as mono compatibility is concerned.
For example, here's a comparison between real double tracking, where there are independent, separate performances in the left and right channels, and the fake double tracking that you can do with a harsh delay. And in both cases, I'll toggle the mono button so you can compare the stereo and mono sound. So, first I'll play the real one, and then the fake.
Now both examples lose some guitar level in mono, as you'd expect for anything that's panned off centre. But the second one also loses a lot of tone. It just becomes weak and diffuse and a bit watery sounding. In a nutshell then, harsh delays are often overlooked by Project Studio users in favor of flashier delay effects.
But they can be extremely useful for transparently widening and blending your mixes, just as long as you don't overcook them and compromise on monocompatibility.
That's all for now. Thanks for listening, and be sure to check out the show notes page for this episode, where you'll find further information including web links and details of all other episodes. You can also download a 24 bit WAV version of the show from there, if you'd like to hear the audio examples at higher resolution.
And just before you go, let me point you towards www. soundonsound. com slash podcasts, where you can explore what's playing on our other channels. I'm Mike Senior, and this is a Cambridge MT production for Sound On Sound magazine.